Cuomo and Biden rally for paid leave, and each other

Vice President Joe Biden says if he had to pick one man “to stand with” in “fighting for a cause that starts in my heart,” it would be Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“This is the guy I want with me,” Biden said Friday during a rally at a Manhattan YMCA, the latest episode in their traveling buddy show.

Story Continued Below

Both Biden and Cuomo recently lost loved ones. They exchanged condolence vists and since then, Biden has become a fixture at Cuomo events.

In the past year, the vice president has joined Cuomo to announce a “wholesale re-imagination of the state,” at which he said Cuomo demonstrated “the kind of thinking we need from other governors.”

He helped Cuomo launch a design competition for the metropolitan region’s airports, at which he compared Cuomo to Abraham Lincoln. He helped Cuomo announce federal funding for a photonics research center in Rochester, where he said Cuomo was “just about the best governor in the whole United States of America."

He rallied with Cuomo for a $15 minimum wage. And on Friday, at the latest event in Cuomo’s left-leaning reorientation, said the governor, like his dad, Mario, is “a moral force."

“[Mario] shamed the nation into doing some things we should have done a long time ago,” Biden said. “But governor, you have picked up the mantle, and you have exceeded, I think, probably even your dad’s expectations.”

During his annual State of the State earlier this month, Cuomo unveiled his plan for 12 weeks of employee-funded paid family leave, a departure from his thinking on the subject last year, when he said the Legislature had “little appetite” for that sort of program.

Under Cuomo’s plan, employees would initially be eligible for 35 percent of their average weekly wage in 2018 — not to exceed 35 percent of the statewide average weekly wage — after working four or more consecutive weeks at a location. The wage percentage workers would get while on family leave would rise to 40 percent in 2019 and to 45 percent in 2020 and be capped at 50 percent every year thereafter.

The program would be funded through employee payroll deductions, not to exceed 60 cents a week.

Only California, Rhode Island and New Jersey offer paid family leave, all of which provide six weeks or less. Federal law provides for up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave, meaning that if New York passed the proposal, it would be the most comprehensive program in the nation.

Though Cuomo’s proposal is employee funded, which is appealing to Republicans who control the upper chamber, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan has “very strong concerns” about how the program would affect small businesses with few employees.

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie also offered some critique of the program, saying the Democrat-dominated Assembly would like to see a paid family leave program that more closely aligned with the legislation the chamber has approved in the past.

But state Sen. Jeffrey Klein, who heads the breakaway Independent Democratic Conference, is on board.

“No New Yorker should ever have to choose between what their heart is telling them to do and what their bank account allows them to do,” Klein said at Friday's rally.

The crowd of union members and Democratic politicians roared in approval. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is close to labor and has expanded paid family leave for non-union city employees, was not there. (He was en route to Iowa to campaign for Hillary Clinton.)

But model Christy Turlington Burns, who runs the organization Every Mother Counts, was on stage. So was Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who praised both the cause and the vice president who, according to her, “has the best smile in politics.”

She introduced the governor, who talked about his father.

“If you have a family who’s passing away, God forbid, you should be there,” Cuomo said. “I know the feeling. I went through it last year with my father … That is a time you need to be there, just to hold a hand, just to dry a tear.”

And he introduced the vice president, who flashed that aforementioned smile.

“I tell you what folks, it’s easy to smile when you’re in New York,” Biden said. “It’s easy to smile when you show up at a place where you agree with everyone in the audience and you agree with everyone on the stage.”